Last night, I finally got my temperature sensors going, including a nice and shiny munin plugin giving me pretty graphs. So far, I only have a sensor in the loft, but I’ll spend some days putting sensors in the rest of the house as well.
Robert McQueen asked me on twitter how this all was set up, so I figured I’d blog about it. The sensors I’m using are the DS18B20 ones from Dallas Semiconductor. You can probably buy them from your local electronics supplier, but mine charges around 75 NOK a piece, so I just bought some off Ebay. It takes a bit longer, but I paid about 1/10th the price.
For logging, I’m using my NAS, which is just a machine running Debian, an USB to serial adapter and an serial-to-1-wire adapter. Thanks a lot to Martin Bergek for the writeup and the ELFA part numbers for diodes.
Since I’m lazy, I ended up just writing a plugin for
munin. It uses owfs, which I downloaded from
mentors.debian.net. I also offered sponsorship for it, assuming a
few small issues are cleaned up, so hopefully you can install using
just Debian in the near future.
owfs is fairly easy to work with, and the plugin uses the aliased
names if you provide aliases, so you can know what the temperature in
a given location is, rather than having to remember 64 bit serial
numbers.